Ridge regression is a technique used for linear regression when the number of predictor variables is greater than the number of observations. It addresses the problem of overfitting by adding a regularization term to the loss function that shrinks large coefficients. This regularization term penalizes coefficients with large magnitudes, improving the model's generalization. Ridge regression finds a balance between minimizing training error and minimizing the size of coefficients by introducing a tuning parameter lambda. The document includes an experiment demonstrating how different lambda values affect the variance and mean squared error of the ridge regression model.